


Keeping

by More_night



Series: The Incredulity of Saint Thomas [1]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, Gen, M/M, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-19
Updated: 2015-09-19
Packaged: 2018-04-21 14:05:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4831916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/More_night/pseuds/More_night
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will finds Abigail's room when they arrive at Hannibal's house by the cliff.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Keeping

**Author's Note:**

> A short piece in the missing scene format, from The Wrath of the Lamb (3x13). Segments in italics are (sometimes alternate) memory palace versions of events. This is possibly more of an imitation exercise than fanfiction – so it’s more more-of-the-same than original-take-on-events. Nevertheless, I hope it works. I needed more sadness and I know you do as well.

Will watched Hannibal in the police car, then the sky and the blond fields, then the dead body, one of its feet caught in the hanging seat belt. He pushed the dead policeman out of the way and climbed into the passenger seat. It felt like leaving the world and embarking on the boat that floated on a river of corpses.

A few miles down, Will took his phone from his jacket, fractured it to remove the chip, then opened the window and threw the chip out. He waited almost a full minute, then the rest of the phone went. He leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes, hoping to go anywhere but here and also anywhere but in the stream. But he did go, _and Hannibal stood beside him in the flowing water, his prison suit wet, his face wearing the same expression it had when Will had touched his hand to the glass: despair, made infinite with understanding, slowly replacing curiosity. This was the real prison. Walls did not matter, but Will mattered._

_Frantic, Will tried to leave the stream and find other images of Hannibal, instead of the imprisoned one. Because it was as if Hannibal had built a prison for them, in this sole image, in this unique moment. In it, they were separated by glass and staring wordlessly. But he found none and he sank._

When he opened his eyes again, Hannibal’s gaze was still on the road, unflinching. Will wondered numbly why there had not been more talking. Hannibal had seemed to want to talk, possibly a lot, once he had taken his mask off. “How long was I-…” Will started.

“Twenty minutes.”

Nodding slowly, Will ran his hands over his face. Focusing again, he leaned forward and inspected the built-in computer interface, in the dashboard between them. He unfastened the plastic casing and found the screws, searching his coat for his pocket knife. Not finding it, he figured Dolarhyde must have taken it away from him, while he was unconscious.

_Dolarhyde peered at him curiously, as Will suggested that he stole a police car from the Baltimore PD to mingle in their escort. “What are you?” he rasped._

_“I’m a monster. But I’m in the darkness. You insist you should be brought to light, forged in fire. I can push you out of the darkness,” Will said, cocking his head._

_Authentic curiosity, like hunger, involved the loss of all thoughts. In that way, words connected directly with thought. “Did Lecter forge your monstrosity?”_

_Rubbing his wrists, Will looked intently forward. The tie-wraps had cut into the flesh, leaving faint marks. “Doctor Lecter usually gives himself a lot of credit.”_

He saw Hannibal move from the corner of his eye, and he looked up at him. The other man’s hand was inches from Will’s face, and held a paper clip, broken, twisted and tightly woven onto itself. Will only breathed through his nose and took the offered tool. “Frederick wanted me to have something to read. He even marked a page,” Hannibal recounted.

“You could have escaped without me.”

“I preferred to wait for your move.”

“So you did,” Will answered flatly.

Using the twined paper clip, Will unscrewed the computer from the dashboard, placed it on his knees and reached inside for the transponder. He threw it out the window, hearing it clang distantly on the pavement, then he set the computer back in and leaned back in his seat again.

Hannibal’s face wore an expression halfway between amused and dreamy. The rest of the drive was silent.

 

* * *

 

From afar, the house seemed bigger than it was. When they turned on a small road, it suddenly came out from behind a cluster of thick pines. The large windows reflected the sunlight, Will blinked it away.

He stayed outside for a moment longer than Hannibal, looking down at the sea, then up at the angry clouds. He had always expected death to be a motion that swept one upwards and above things, but now he thought he should settle for a downward movement.

Inside, furniture was preserved from dust under large white clothes. Closing his eyes, he saw _himself, Hannibal and Abigail, years earlier, coming through the front door, drenched in the rain that kept falling. They moved around wihtout really walking. Abigail showed him around and he felt like he was wrapped in clouds, or on fire, and in fact he was falling._

_Hannibal followed them slowly, turning the lights on as they went._

_Abigail went to her room and Will stayed in the kitchen, dropping his bags, taking his hand to his eyes, testing if it would all be gone when he looked again. Hannibal approached to stand behind him and Will rested in the embrace that came from behind. The other man whispered, “I gave you a rare gift.” Will crossed his own arms over Hannibal’s, over his abdomen_ , where the scar was.

In the distance, he heard the shower running and he made his way in the other direction, looking at the two guest rooms, both doors opened. One bed had a coverlet that reminded him of his own. The other had been Abigail’s room, he understood, through mild shock, as he walked in.

Everything spoke of her: the quiet, serious young woman tones (blue, mixed with shades of green, some rare pink and yellow), the single bed, the shoes under it, the white lamp on the table where she had sat. He stood in front of the wardrobe doors for longer than he was aware, before opening them and finding her clothes, some old, some new. There was a small bookshelf in the corner, with rows and piles, some of the books hers, some others Hannibal’s choices.

The world should have been spinning under his feet, and it was not. Will was as grounded as he could have been, _while the room filled with dark running water. He caressed the hanging clothes and water reached his waist._ _“Will,” Abigail called out. She took a bag from under the nightstand and emptied it on the bed, proudly exposing the documents proving her new identity, and Will smiled, relieved, enjoying her enjoyment, grateful for her safety, knowing Hannibal would preserve her forever and trusting him to. She held out her fake passport. Will sat on the bed, drenched in water still, and looked at it pensively. When his eyes moved to Abigail again, Walter stared back. “You should kill him.”_

When he looked up, Hannibal was in the doorway, dressed in pants and a sweater, a jacket draped over his arm. “This was Abigail’s room,” Will said, more as an explanation than as a question.

Hannibal walked in calmly.

“If we had left Baltimore that night, we would have come here, right?” Will asked, as Hannibal placed his jacket down on the bed and sat down beside him, withdrawn enough.

“For a time,” he offered.

“And then?”

“We could have gone wherever Abigail wanted. Wherever you wanted,” he started, eyes ahead of him, but elsewhere. Then he shrugged minutely. “I had no particular plans.”

“Why didn’t you come here with Bedelia?” Suddenly, Will felt the need to question. As the words kept coming out of his mouth, he did not know what was more important: asking the questions himself, or obtaining the answers he would know he already knew when he would ear them.

Hannibal turned to face him, and Will avoided him. “This place was meant for us, not for myself alone.”

“When you told me about your sister, why didn’t you tell me that Abigail was alive?” Will’s eyes met his now. “I would have come with you, at that moment. I would have told you everything,” he pressed.

“At that moment, had you asked, I could not have lied.”

_“Abigail reminded me so much of her.”_

_Will looked at his crossed ankles, then at the fire, and asked. “Then why did you kill her?”_

_“What happened to Abigail had to happen. What makes you think I killed her?” Hannibal said, then._

_And Will looked at him, his eyes wide, his head filling with yet another mixture of emotions he could not before have imagine come together: simultaneous despair and deliverance. “You only wanted me to feel the loss as it existed in you,” he whispered, at the same time contemplating sticking the letter opener in Hannibal’s temple and exploding with a solace so great he felt it would crush him at any instant. “Where is she?”  
_

_“She’s not here. She’s safe, sheltered,” Hannibal assured him, his words heavy and heavier as he realized how considerably ahead of his plan they were putting both of them. “Once we leave, I’ll get her an appointment with a plastic surgeon for her ear.”_

_Will got up and ran his hands through his hair. The air coming out of his lungs did nothing, it seemed, to make him part of this world again. Still, he felt as if he was hoisted above his own body, floating, escaping everything, finally. “Can I… talk to her?”_

_Hannibal did not stand and stared up at him. He seemed to hesitate whether he should display sadness or share delight, lips parting, but he did nothing, his eyes shadowed again in truth and attachment. Finally, he got up, went to the locked cabinet and took a cell phone out, dialing. He handed it to Will as it rang. The other man’s fingers clutched it, brought it to his ear, and when Abigail said “Hello?” he ruptured in light._

Will took Abigail’s passport from where it lay on the bed. He did not open it again. “I want to keep this. At least for now.”

“You can keep all you want.”

“Am I not taking her from you?” Will said, strangely thankful, as if he had expected to have to take the object from Hannibal by force. But there was nothing he could take by force anyore. “Was it not why you didn’t tell me? Because you didn't mean to share her...”

“I wanted you to take much more from me, Will, than a daughter,” Hannibal said, in the quiet and serious tone of voice he used when he dropped the truth at his feet, bare and blatant.

“And I took it.” Will’s lips formed a sad smile. “In your memory palace, am I in the good rooms or the bad ones?” Will asked.

_Lying on his bunkbed, his arm over his eyes, Hannibal did not sleep and opened a wooden door, in one of the rooms of his childhood days where he could still go. For a moment, Mischa flickered in and out of sight, her back to him and her short, flowing blond hair out of grasp. Then she turned away and left to another room. He called out for her and he was only eight years old, so he ran after her footsteps._

_She opened a door to another room and closed it behind her. Reaching it, he turned the handle, but found other, if familiar walls around him. A small house, a piano, a makeshift bed. He was himself again and no longer a child, when his eyes fell down to where Mischa sat, beside Will Graham, who was showing her how to tie the string tightly around the feathers. “It’s a lure, so it has to be solid enough to kill. Make it tight. Watch your fingers,” he advised, calmly, turning around._

_Will got up and walked until he was facing him, hands in his pockets, and smiled, protective, gentle, as he saw Hannibal’s mind come apart. “Do you see a life flashing before your eyes that’s not your own?” he asked. Mischa got up and came between them, presenting her fly to Hannibal, smiling with her eyes as he would have, and immensely proud._

_Hannibal pulled his arm from his eyes and searched for the skylight in the ceiling of his prison cell. Then he watched the clouds and the stars pass in turn, and remembered Will Graham’s advice: not sleeping is the best way to keep bad dreams away._

“You are in every single room I ever built, even those I don't enter, for I would fall down. And myself?”

Will studied the side of Hannibal’s face, noticed but not stopped. “I tried to keep you from the stream, but you came anyway. So I stopped going.”

Hannibal eventually turned to him. “I missed talking with you.”

“You have a copy of me in your mind to talk with,” Will supplied, in a low voice.

“It never speaks words that I haven’t already heard.”

Will paused for a moment and did not say that he had missed him as well. Words kept coming to his lips, so he took his eyes to wander again at the room around him. Tears came to his eyes and filled them.

Hannibal watched him brush the tears away, then said, “I cannot authentically regret what I did to Abigail.”

Breathing deeply, feeling the warmth leave his face, Will acknowledged. “My forgiveness, for this, still stands.”

Searching for Will’s eyes, Hannibal understood that he had been misled in thinking that those tears were for Abigail. Then he suspected they were for Will himself. Then he thought otherwise. “Then you have gained some new knowledge about me,” he finally breathed, serene.

“Yes,” Will said curtly, clearing his voice. “You have a treacherous, if unconventional, psychiatrist. She divulges your secrets to anyone who asks.”

“I’m sure you asked the right questions.”

“I wish she’d lied,” Will replied. “But I must not have it easy, must I?”

His eyes did not leave Hannibal as Will lifted his hand, trying to feel if there was still a wall of glass between them. If there had been, things would be better, separate, distinct. There would be some order in the world. But he found no wall, as he reached out and closer, and the closer he came, the more layers dissolved in Hannibal’s face. His fingertips grazed the sweater and Hannibal brought his own hand up, taking Will’s hand down until it rested on the bed.

“He’s here already, surveilling the property,” Hannibal explained, gesturing to the large window, its open blinds and the night beyond it. 

Composing himself again, Will confirmed. “He’s probably filming us, actually. He records them before he changes them.”

Their hands were side by side, on the dark blue and pale green tiny squares of the bed’s coverlet. “It’s the only way he can compare the effects of his ways. Before and after,” Hannibal mused.

Moving slowly, Will took two of Hannibal’s fingers with his own and watched as they curled together. “I'm not sure what he would think of this. Maybe of something that deserves its own death. As you did,” he said coolly, resisting the closeness he felt dragging him.

“Past tense,” Hannibal noted, stilled as if stone rolled in his veins, fire having diminished into lava and frozen into rock.

Will insisted, knowing he could. “Look at me.” Hannibal tilted his head up and corridors and rooms opened before him, where Will would stand forever after this, with the expression he wore now, as his thumb stroked the side of his hand. A moment passed. _They stood in front of each others, before the burning lanterns in the chapel. A few people walked by and others prayed. They did not seem to notice the bleeding sculpture, facing the altar. They did not see the heart-shaped human body, its blood staining the floor, drop after drop. It started beating, steadily, bones cracking, muscles disjointing, as its dead flesh fluttered._

“We should get something to drink,” Will finally suggested.

Hannibal nodded. He got up first and made his way to the kitchen, walking not in a house, but inwardly, to store Will’s face and touch in a chest he would never again open. Will rose, taking off his jacket. He took his gun out of its holster and slipped it in the back of his trousers, untucking his shirt to hide it. He thought of putting Abigail's passport in his pocket, _but Abigail said, “Don't worry, I'll keep it for you.” She was standing by the window, all light, white and love.  
_

**Author's Note:**

> The line Will says to Hannibal (in the Mischa/Wolf Trap moment) is actually a line from the Ko-No-Mono (2x11) script, but it’s Hannibal saying it to Will, when they talk about fatherhood. I'm pointing it out because, at the moment, I can’t remember if it’s in the episode or not.


End file.
